I am saying the costs that are not accounted for, namely the effort spent by every not buying a product consuming an advertisement, is extremely high and outweighs the value of products sold. Moreover, there is no clear reason to think the persuasion of people in mass is good based just on selling more products. Finally, if a person is only persuaded to buy a different brand of product the value is effectively only the small marginal difference between brands.
It also consumes human labor when people absorb the marketing. This is an externality not accounted for in the cost of marketing, it is large, and it makes resources unavailable for more productive tasks.
Combinatorics can be surprising bc there are 10^178620 possible English works the length of Hamlet. That we have exhausted the span of possible works is extremely untrue.
And yet those ppl are now dead. So advocating for any position other than the one which removes the possibility of people making the choice to kill others is to support those deaths. Which is to say to support the status quo in the USA is to support the deaths of these people.